What Really Happened at the Pentagon’s Once-Hidden UFO Office?

What Really Happened at the Pentagon’s Once-Hidden UFO Office?

By Luis Cayetano Simmari & Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos

After a long hiatus of systematic U.S. government–affiliated investigations into UFOs, a Pentagon office quietly resumed such efforts in 2008. Called the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications Program (AAWSAP), it was funded to the tune of $22 million in total. The life—and cancellation four years later—of this Defense Intelligence Agency program has featured in congressional hearings, UFO “whistleblower” claims and renewed public uproar about aliens. But the real story is more sordid than sensational.

In 2022 the U.S. Department of Defense established the brand-new and separate All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to investigate military reports of UFOs, now called unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP. Currently AARO offers a unique chance for the government to get this UFO thing right once and for all—but not in quite the way that more hard-line alien believers might wish.

The new office has its hands full. Last year congressional hearings heard claims of alien technology recoveries and a supposed decades-long cover-up of ET’s presence on Earth. Such assertions fill the new book Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, by former military counterintelligence officer Luis Elizondo, attracting renewed notice among podcasters and serious news outlets alike.

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Investigating these unverifiable fables about aliens should be scrapped as a fool’s errand for AARO, which earlier this year released a historical review demolishing this long-running conspiracy theory. The office’s real value, from a technical standpoint, lies in resolving UFO sighting reports with the very latest technology and tools, supplementing time-honored fact-checking and investigation, and showing how UFOs can be tracked and resolved in real time using high-tech sensors, rather than relying on the suboptimal witness testimonials that fill bookshelves and cable-news specials.

Government-themed conspiracy theories have been part of the UFO milieu for decades, but recent testimonies by “whistleblowers” to congressional committees have given these accounts a hitherto unparalleled air of authenticity. Far from being a scientific sea change, however, as longtime scholars of UFO claims we regard them as having elements closer to religion, with the same core group of advocates—including some former AAWSAP insiders—pushing the “nonhuman intelligence” narrative of hidden aliens or interdimensional beings.

AAWSAP was officially meant to research future aerospace threats but was a de facto UFO/paranormal investigation effort, a fact affirmed in the AARO historical report. Controversy has surrounded the office since the publication of a credulous 2017 New York Times article identified it by the moniker “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” (AATIP). The acronym soup confusion regarding the name has been exacerbated by Elizondo, who co-opted the AATIP label for his own, informal follow-on effort at the Pentagon after AAWSAP’s termination in 2012.

AAWSAP’s output included 38 “Defense Intelligence Reference Documents” produced by scientists contracted by mogul and UFO enthusiast Robert Bigelow, along with other reports described in two books. The latter reports reference as-yet unreleased databases of international UFO cases, investigations and findings from the “spooky” Skinwalker Ranch in Utah once owned by Bigelow, and monthly reports supposedly delivered to the DIA, along with a 494-page “10 Month Report” replete with charts, graphs and findings. There are good reasons to harbor doubts about these reports’ quality and objectivity.

Elizondo’s effort, despite his countless mass media and podcast appearances, has yielded no publicly accessed findings or deliverables proving any claims about a UFO cover-up. These may come to light, but “AARO assesses that the inaccurate claim that the USG [U.S. government] is reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology and is hiding it from Congress is, in large part, the result of circular reporting from a group of individuals who believe this to be the case, despite a lack of evidence,” that office concluded in its recent report.

This entire saga shows how pseudoscientific thinking can metastasize in a positive feedback loop, ensnaring not only scientists with paranormal inclinations but also government officials. This was bemoaned by the former head of AARO, Sean Kirkpatrick, who remarked that these officials are tasked with matters of national urgency—a responsibility necessitating a mindset committed to objective investigation and analysis. Some of these officials are on the record casting AARO as part of the “cover-up.” Indeed, the UFO belief system has long ago morphed into a type of faith requiring no evidence.

The fact that officials harboring evidence-deficient beliefs regarding extraterrestrials and “high strangeness” (a term first popularized in the early 1970s by ufologists to describe certain bizarre and seemingly absurd elements of some UFO and “alien” encounters) are entrusted with national security matters should give one pause. America’s adversaries, to the extent that they are paying attention to the UFO mess, might well regard it as yet another avenue to undermine American institutions—somewhat reflecting a CIA panel’s 1953 warning about potential Soviet exploitation of the genre.

On a more positive note, ufology is now in vogue among historians keen to understand the mythical nature of the problem and how it relates to historical waves of aerial phenomena reports. Because of how modern media, and especially now digital media, magnify the voices of breathless advocates, sundry frauds and scientists with a penchant for the paranormal, the UFO phenomenon from 1947 onward has acquired much greater gravitas than prior scares and waves, some of which predate it by centuries.

Many serious people dismiss UFOs as a fringe interest or a pop culture distraction. Yes, they are. Yet we maintain, along with an increasing number of scholars, that there is much to be learned from studying UFO sightings, flaps and waves. While our own view is that UFOs, or UAP, emphatically do not represent any truly anomalous physical phenomena such as an extraterrestrial presence, this nevertheless does not consign ufology to insignificance. We should explore its meaning rather than ceding it to sensationalistic advocates employing shoddy methodologies and pushing quasi-religious, otherworldly stories. AARO and academia are thus tasked with an important responsibility that could yield original and fascinating developments into how and why people interpret and react to things they see in the sky.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.